I’ve been interviewing at a lot of places lately. I _never_ white board interviewed before this round of interviews I’ve done And at first I have to say that I hated it so much.
In a weird way though, I’ve at least grown to understand why it’s so popular, and I don’t think it’s just because FAANGS do it (though I think that’s how it came to prominence). It boils down to showing as an engineer your capable of being flexible and malleable your change and understanding. Some places definitely do this better than others, and I think it says a lot about company culture if they are Adversarial about it or not. In my experience rather unfortunately even good places to work can be adversarial about it.
The massive downside is and always will be it puts so much onerous on the candidate because you don’t really know what they are going to ask and freezing up or getting stumped is very frowned upon in these style interviews from what I experienced.
My tip to anyone though is just to practice, but I’ve yet to encounter places that don’t employ some technique to test algorithmic thinking and understanding of complex systems in some way.
In a weird way though, I’ve at least grown to understand why it’s so popular, and I don’t think it’s just because FAANGS do it (though I think that’s how it came to prominence). It boils down to showing as an engineer your capable of being flexible and malleable your change and understanding. Some places definitely do this better than others, and I think it says a lot about company culture if they are Adversarial about it or not. In my experience rather unfortunately even good places to work can be adversarial about it.
The massive downside is and always will be it puts so much onerous on the candidate because you don’t really know what they are going to ask and freezing up or getting stumped is very frowned upon in these style interviews from what I experienced.
My tip to anyone though is just to practice, but I’ve yet to encounter places that don’t employ some technique to test algorithmic thinking and understanding of complex systems in some way.